Detection of Apneas in Infants During Sleep: A Study Comparing Thoracic Impedance and Inductive Plethysmography

Breathing disorders of different etiologies are frequent problems in neonatal intensive care, but also in hospital and outpatient treatment of small infants. Thus, there is a great need for secure and practicable assessment of infants’ respiratory movements and detection of apneas. Current measurement techniques for this purpose include piezo elements, infra red sensors, pneumatic elements, thoracic impedance pneumography, and respiratory inductive plethysmography (1-4). In different stages of infant development, registration of inand expiratory movements is greatly disturbed by artifacts. Apparently, thoracic impedance (TI) and inductive plethysmography (IP) are the two predominant techniques for measurement of respiratory movements during infancy (5-7). The aim of this study is to test and compare the signal reliability of the two methods. As reference values we used all simultaneous recorded parameters of the polysomnography to objective both methods. From the results, we derived recommendations for respiratory monitoring and detection of apneas during the first year of life.